Why We Need Big, Bold Science Fiction

Sci-Fi used to be about bold engineering, and so was America. PM Resident Contrarian Glenn Harlan Reynolds says that's the spirit we need to recapture. No more depressing dystopias (we're looking at you, The Hunger Games)—give us sci-fi that inspires people to dream big.

The future isn't what it used to be. And neither is science fiction. While books about space exploration and robots once inspired young people to become scientists and engineers—and inspired grownup engineers and scientists to do big things—in recent decades the field has become dominated by escapist fantasies and depressing dystopias. That could be contributing to something that I see as a problem. It seems that too many technically savvy people, engineers in particular, are going to work for Web startups or investment firms. There's nothing wrong with such companies, but we also need engineers to design bold new things for use in the physical world: space colonies instead of social media.

If I'm right, that's bad for all of us. But are we really losing the will to do big things or are the big things just different than they used to be? I asked around and, on this subject, found science-fiction writers to be pessimistic.

One of today's best SF authors is Neal Stephenson, whose books include Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age. In a recent article in the World Policy Journal, he writes that during science fiction's so-called golden age—roughly the late 1930s to the late 1960s—the stories being published were about big things and big breakthroughs: moon rockets, Mars bases, robots, and teleportation. Perhaps by coincidence, those were times when the United States was actually doing big things and making big breakthroughs. Now, writes Stephenson, "[s]peaking ­broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a darker, more skeptical, and ambiguous tone."

Those stories can be good—some credit Stephenson's own 1992 book, Snow Crash, with anticipating the social media revolution—but are they good for us? Or have we been focusing our imagination and efforts on things that are amusing but unimportant? Stephenson recently told The New York Times, "We can't Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo." He is calling for new ways to expand civilization, not new forums for gossip.

I called Stephenson and asked him to elaborate. "There was some moment in the late '60s and '70s when people thought we had enough tech," he says. "Technology was too dangerous, and people became reflexively skeptical of new ideas. If you stay that way for a couple of decades, it can come back to bite you. There's also a less obvious danger, which is that if science and technology stop wowing us, people start to develop skepticism about the scientific method."

That's a good point. In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists could cite antibiotics, nuclear energy, and moon flights as evidence that science just plain worked. This gave them credibility on a range of issues.

Facebook doesn't have the same impact—it's fun, but even its users don't see it as an achievement on par with Apollo. Stephenson worries about that: "We've had a lost generation of space geeks, who never really got the full brainwash."

But are things really that bad? I asked another eminent science-fiction author, Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep, The Children of the Sky), to weigh in and, alas, he agreed. Science fiction, Vinge says, has become more escapist but less inspiring. He believes the real problem isn't to be found in science fiction, but in society. In particular, he argues that we've lost "speed of implementation." We went from experimental jets to the F-104 in a decade, and to outer space in just 10 more years. Nowa­days, we're not so fast, at least with high-visibility projects. (Just look at the bureaucratic inertia around replacing the space shuttle.)

In my day job as a law professor, I tell my administrative law students the same thing. Not far from our campus in Knoxville is Norris Dam. The first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, it was generating electricity three years after the TVA Act passed Congress. If the TVA were created today, three years wouldn't even be enough time to produce the environmental impact statement. Sure, you can roll out a new social media platform or an iPhone app in a hurry, but do Twitter and Angry Birds improve lives the way rural electrification did?

There is one solution on the horizon. If, as Vinge expects, we reach the Singularity—a moment when artificial intelligences become more powerful than human brains—in a few decades, "we'll have far more imaginative creatures around," he says. So long as they're not Skynet.

For a reality check on the state of innovation, I spoke with inventor Dean Kamen, whose many credits include a portable dialysis machine, a DARPA-funded robotic prosthetic arm, and the Segway—along with the FIRST robotics competitions for middle and high school kids. Kamen was more optimistic than my science-fiction writers. From his perspective, the problem is actually that writers are falling behind. "Science-fiction writers aren't being imaginative enough to get ahead of the science," he says. "You walk into a major university medical center and what you find is something way beyond science fiction."

Kamen agrees that we're not making enough progress in space, but says, "That's because of the excitement at home—cloning, curing diseases, extending life." And yet he agrees with Stephenson's argument that the Internet, while obviously a valuable tool, can also be an unfortunate distraction: "We've given people new ways to communicate but nothing worth saying. I wish people understood the difference between data and information. The fact that it's easy, fast, and cheap doesn't mean that it's valuable."

At one level, it's hard to argue that point. Early hominids liked to sit around gossiping. If nowadays we're picking fleas out of each other's hair electronically instead of in person, well, that's sort of an improvement, but it's not a revolutionary one.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people who have created small but flourishing businesses using the Internet to do things that would have been too difficult in the old days of paper mail and landline phones. In addition, some scientists are using social media to speed progress, long before Vinge's superintelligent AI arrives: Video-­gamers recently solved a protein-­folding problem involving the AIDS virus that had baffled researchers for years. And the crowdsourcing of politics is promoting democracy worldwide. Beyond that, video games have educational potential: My daughter learned a lot about budgeting from The Sims.

On balance, though, I have to agree that the kind of progress Neal Stephenson is pushing for is more important. My perspective is informed by something a golden age writer, Robert A. Heinlein, once said: "Earth is too fragile a basket to hold all of our eggs." There are lots of metrics you can use to assess technological progress. But to me, the overarching goal of the next century or so has to be to spread humanity beyond Earth—and, ideally, beyond the solar system.

Between potential natural disasters like asteroid strikes and plagues, and man-made threats like nuclear weapons and biological warfare, the risk that humanity will be destroyed by some catastrophe is unacceptably high. The solution, it seems to me (and to others, like Stephen Hawking), is for civilization to expand so widely that no plausible disaster will wipe us all out.

On this metric, the golden age approach to technology—all those rocket ships and Mars bases—looks better: Facebook probably won't save us from economic stagnation; it certainly won't save us from an asteroid.

Besides, the golden age approach is just more inspiring. Novels about brooding antiheroes may be good literature, but they likely won't inspire teenagers to study physics or engineering. Golden age science fiction—and in particular, those Heinlein junior novels such as Have Space Suit—Will Travel or Rocket Ship Galileo—did that.

Neal Stephenson is putting together an anthology of pro-progress science fiction. And SF writer Sarah A. Hoyt, author of DarkShip Thieves, thinks the balance between utopian and dystopian science fiction is already swinging back toward the positive. As evidence, she points to new works such as Ric Locke's Temporary Duty, written in the spirit of those old Heinlein novels and trumpeting technical knowledge and self-reliance rather than introspection.

"If the friends I have in science are right, computers are about to explode a bunch of fields," Hoyt says. "I think crowdsourcing research and the faster integration of knowledge, as well as the snowball effect of having reached a certain point in knowledge, are about to unlock all sorts of innovations in computing, biology, pharmaceuticals, genetics, and perhaps things that will get private companies into space."

If all that comes to pass, science fiction could take on the role it had decades ago, dreaming of new horizons while helping people understand and adjust to an evolving reality. "I think my field is on the verge of an explosion of forward-looking and outward-­looking works," Hoyt says.

I hope she's right about that too. Science and engineering are about what we can do, but often what we actually wind up doing is driven by the stories we tell. We should make sure they're the right ones.